Category Archives: Africa

Great article from Global Research. I am not sure if this war is actually going to happen. Israel’s apparent causus belli for the war is because they say that Iran has built a missile factory in Lebanon. Iran has indeed built a missile factory in Lebanon. I am not sure where it is and why Israel cannot take it out. Maybe it is underground. I would guess that it is in the Bekaa Valley.

The missile count for Hezbollah is not correct. Hezbollah actually 150,000 missiles aimed at Israel. There are reports that only six of those are precision-guided, but that is not correct. I don’t know how many precision-guided missiles they have, but they have a lot more than six.

The Lebanese Army is not very good. The effective army of Lebanon is Hezbollah. That is why they had 85% support in a recent poll in Lebanon. A recent move by Hezbollah to consolidate power among itself and its allies in the Parliament actually had the support of 47% of Lebanese Christians. Hezbollah is in an alliance with, among others, General Aoun’s Christian faction. As you can see, Lebanon is a lot more complex than Christians versus Muslims.

The real enemies of Hezbollah are the Lebanese Sunnis around President Hariri. Recently he went to Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis, with a go-ahead from the US, actually kidnapped him and forced him to stay in Arabia. They also demanded that he resign from the Presidency. He resigned so they would let him go, but when he got back to Lebanon, he withdrew his resignation and once again assumed his position.

The Saudis think that Lebanon is their bitch, but they are wrong. The Hariri faction does not have wide support in Lebanon – maybe 20-25% support. The Saudis were trying to provoke a crisis in Lebanon by having Hariri resign. This might set off internal conflict in Lebanon, which the Saudis want, or it might have been to cause a crisis as an excuse to attack Lebanon. “Hariri Resigns, Calls Lebanon a Hezbollah Dictatorship” would be the headlines, and then the US, Israel or Arabia would use that as a go-ahead to be humanitarian bombers and attack Lebanon “to restore democracy.”

Make no mistake about it, the Saudis want Hezbollah gone. They also want Iran dead and gone. Neither is going anywhere soon.

Iran, Hezbollah (Lebanon), and Syria form the Axis of Resistance. These are the only three official state enemies that Israel has left. They’ve taken out Libya and Iraq. If the Houthis win in Yemen, they might join the Axis of Resistance also. The Gulf states are not friendly to Israel, but Israel does not regard them as enemy states. They even have a long term alliance with the Saudis. Israel has a peace treaty with Jordan and Egypt. However, popular opinion in both countries is dead set against Israel, but both are dictatorships that do not represent popular will.

The Israel-hostile Muslim Brotherhood was replaced by a secular dictator supported by the US, Israel, and the Saudis. The Saudis hate the Muslim Brotherhood because they see them as rivals who want to rule Saudi Arabia. Doctrinally, there is not much difference between the two. I believe Qatar dislikes the MB also for the same reason. The MB is huge in Jordan and occupies many seats in Parliament. Hamas is the MB of Palestine, but they never talk about that because Palestine is quite secular, and the MB is not popular there for that reason. The MB is big among Sunnis in Northern Lebanon. Of course they have always been huge in Egypt – their birthplace. Hassan al-Banna created the MB in Egypt in 1928.

Lebanon as a state absolutely hates Israel. They have no relations with them, and the two are officially still at war, as Israel never signed an armistice with Lebanon in 1949. Libya has been neutralized as a state and is no threat to Israel. The new government of Tunisia is saying that they want diplomatic relations with Israel, and this is setting off huge demonstrations in Tunisia. Algeria is not friendly with Israel, but they are no threat either. The same is true in Morocco.

Turkey is also unfriendly, but they are no threat either, and they have been working closely with the Israelis in Syria. Israeli and Turkish intelligence were embedded in Al Qaeda in Syria, along with US, Saudi, and UAE intelligence. If you recall back when Aleppo was finally being liberated, there were intense negotiations going on at the end because there were some allied intelligence officers who had taken refuge in the last holdouts of the city. This included 10-12 US intelligence agents who were embedded in Syrian Al Qaeda.

A lot of people in the region are playing a very dirty game these days!

This previously published article (December 2017) on Global Research reveals the well-calculated plan of the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia on inciting a “civil war” in Lebanon to defeat Hezbollah.

Israel – seemingly leading the squad with the green signal from Washington – has just fabricated yet another grounds for war.

***

Washington’s plan to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has ultimately failed. Now Lebanon seems to be in the cross-hairs with tensions between Israel and Hezbollah on the same level that led to the 2006 Lebanon war. There is also the possibility that a new offensive against Syria that might take place as Washington maintains its troop levels in the devastated country caused by ISIS and other terrorists groups they supported. Various reports suggests that the Pentagon may reveal that there are close to 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in Syria even though ISIS has been defeated. So why is Washington staying in Syria? Will there be another attempt to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the near future? Most likely, yes. Adding the Trump administration’s continued hostilities towards Iran, the drumbeats of a new war in the Middle East is loud and clear.

Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. have one main objective at the moment and that is to destabilize Lebanon and attempt to defeat Hezbollah before they prepare for another offensive in Syria to remove Assad from power. Before they declare an all-out war on Iran, they must neutralize their allies, Hezbollah and Syria, which is by far an extremely difficult task to accomplish.

The Israeli government knows that it cannot defeat Hezbollah without sacrificing both its military and civilian populations. Israel needs the U.S. military for added support if their objective is to somewhat succeed. Israel and the U.S. can continue its support of ISIS and other terrorist groups to create a new civil war in Lebanon through false-flag terror operations which in a strategic sense, can lead to an internal civil war.

Can Hezbollah and the Lebanese military prevent terrorist groups from entering its territory? So far they have been successful in defeating ISIS on the Lebanon-Syria border and will most likely be successful in preventing a new U.S.-supported terrorist haven in Lebanon. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri who originally resigned from his post while visiting the Saudi Kingdom and then suspended his resignation is a sign that a political crisis has been set in motion. So what happens next?

The Curse: Lebanon’s Natural Resources and the Greater Israel Project

In the case of a devastating war on Lebanon, with a civil war intact, Israel would surely attempt to take control over Lebanon’s natural resources. Since Trump got in the White House, Israel has expanded its Jewish settlements through land seizures throughout Palestine at unprecedented levels and with the occupation of the Golan Heights (a Syrian territory), they already control a portion of oil, gas, and vital water supplies. Lebanon would be a huge bonus.

In 2013, Lebanese Energy Minister Gebran Bassil estimated that Lebanon has around 96 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves and 865 million barrels of oil offshore. With Lebanon’s political chaos and Israel preparing for a long-term war with Hezbollah, all of this leads to Israel Shahak’s The Zionist Plan for the Middle East which states the intended goal for the fragmentation of Lebanon and other adversaries in the Middle East:

3) This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme. This theme has been documented on a very modest scale in the AAUG publication Israel’s Sacred Terrorism (1980), by Livia Rokach. Based on the memoirs of Moshe Sharett, former Prime Minister of Israel, Rokach’s study documents, in convincing detail, the Zionist plan as it applies to Lebanon and as it was prepared in the mid-fifties.

4) The first massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 bore this plan out to the minutest detail. The second and more barbaric and encompassing Israeli invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982, aims to effect certain parts of this plan which hopes to see not only Lebanon but Syria and Jordan as well in fragments.

This ought to make mockery of Israeli public claims regarding their desire for a strong and independent Lebanese central government. More accurately, they want a Lebanese central government that sanctions their regional imperialist designs by signing a peace treaty with them. They also seek acquiescence in their designs by the Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, and other Arab governments as well as by the Palestinian people. What they want and what they are planning for is not an Arab world, but a world of Arab fragments that is ready to succumb to Israeli hegemony. Hence, Oded Yinon in his essay, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980’s,” talks about “far-reaching opportunities for the first time since 1967” that are created by the “very stormy situation [that] surrounds Israel.

Israel is gearing up for a long and devastating war against Hezbollah, an Iranian-ally which is based in Lebanon’s southern region to deter Israel’s expansionist ideas. As Saudi Arabia (Israel’s closest ally in the region) continues its immoral and devastating war on Yemen, it is raising tensions with Iran. According to Thomas L. Friedman’s article Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, At Last praising who he calls “M.B.S.” or Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for his reformist policies. According to Friedman:

“Iran’s “supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East,” said M.B.S. “But we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work. We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East.”

The Trump administration’s continued support of the Saudi Monarchy which negotiated an arms deal worth billions has only emboldened the Saudi government to take an aggressive stand towards its adversaries in the Middle East namely, Iran.

Lebanon Prepares for Another War

On November 21st, Reuters published an article titled Lebanon army chief warns of Israel threat amid political crisis based on Lebanon’s Army Chief warning his troops to be on high alert concerning Israel’s aggressive behavior along the southern border. It was reported:

“Lebanon’s army chief told his soldiers on Tuesday to be extra vigilant to prevent unrest during political turmoil after the prime minister quit, and accused Israel of “aggressive” intentions across the southern frontier” despite Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s return to Lebanon and decision to put his resignation on hold.

“Troops should be ready to “thwart any attempt to exploit the current circumstances for stirring strife” and that “the exceptional political situation that Lebanon is going through requires you to exercise the highest levels of awareness.”

Israel understands that a defeat against Hezbollah and the Lebanese military will be absolutely difficult to accomplish, therefore preparations to engage Hezbollah this time will be an effort to create as much damage as possible and reduce their military capabilities, maybe in time for U.S. troops to enter the war through Syria and coordinate targets with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). As I mentioned earlier, and may I add with an interesting choice of words, a report published by Reuters on November 24th suggests that the Pentagon might announce how many troops they have in Syria:

Two U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Pentagon could as early as Monday publicly announce that there are slightly more than 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria. They said there was always a possibility that last minute changes in schedules could delay an announcement. That is not an increase in troop numbers, just a more accurate count, as the numbers often fluctuate.

A War That No One Will Win

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), an establishment think-tank based in New York City published an article on July 30th of this year by neocon warmonger Eliot Abrams who was a deputy assistant and deputy national security adviser for President George W. Bush titled The Next Israel-Hezbollah Conflict admits that “the next war is a war that will not be “won” by Israel or Hezbollah.”

Abrams said that “Israel’s realistic war aims will not match the damage it will suffer—and the damage it will necessarily inflict” in reference to a strategic assessment by a report by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies titled Political and Military Contours of the Next Conflict with Hezbollah by Gideon Sa’ar, an Israeli politician and a former Likud member of the Knesset, and Ron Tira, a strategist, Israeli Air Force officer and pilot, highlights what Israel’s realistic goals should be:

Israel’s objectives in a future conflict will be derived first and foremost from what it wants to achieve in the distinct context (such as, for example, preventing Hezbollah’s buildup of certain qualitative edge capabilities or preventing deployment of high quality Iranian weapon systems in Syria).

But a review of the fundamental data reveals a few “generic” objectives that could be applicable in many contexts: postponing the following conflict, shaping the rules for the routine times that will follow the conflict, increasing deterrence with respect to Hezbollah and third parties, undermining the attractiveness of Hezbollah’s war paradigm (use of rockets and missiles hidden among the civilian population), preserving Israel’s relations with its allies, and creating the conditions to reduce Iranian involvement in the post-war reconstruction of Lebanon, as well as imposing new and enforceable restrictions on the freedom of access of the Iran-Alawite-Hezbollah axis.

The strategic assessment mentioned what realistic goals Israel can achieve when the conflict takes place according to the assessment:

There is only a limited range of “positive” and achievable objectives that Israel can hope to attain from Hezbollah and from Lebanon. While the purpose of an armed conflict is always political, in many contexts it is hard to find a political objective that is both meaningful and achievable at a reasonable cost, and that is the reason for the basic lack of value that can be found in an Israel- Hezbollah military conflict.

The reason that an Israeli defeat over Hezbollah is impossible according to Mr. Abrams’s conclusion is because of Russia’s presence in the region:

That’s because Russia cannot be expelled, Lebanon will remain roughly half-Shia, and Hezbollah will survive—as will its relationship with Iran. After the war, the best assumption would be that Hezbollah will rebuild as it did after 2006. But Hezbollah would achieve nothing positive in such a conflict, suffering immense damage and bringing immense destruction upon Lebanon. Its only possible “gain” is the damage it would inflict on Israel. In a way this is the only “good news.”

Israel’s Economy During Wartime

David Rosenberg’s opinion piece Israel’s Next War: We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet on the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict in the Israel-based news source Haaretz explains the consequences of war and how it effects Israel’s economy. Rosenberg said that:

In 2014, the missile war wasn’t a threat so much as a spectacle, as Israelis watched Iron Dome missiles bring down Qassam rockets, to applause. Score one for the home team.

However, Rosenberg claims that the next war with Hezbollah will be different, in fact it will effect Israel’s economy in several ways:

The next war isn’t going to look like that. The round figure everyone uses for Hezbollah’s missile arsenal is 100,000. That is a suspiciously round figure and is probably wrong, but no one disputes that the Shiite militia is well-armed, and more importantly, many of its missiles carry much more powerful warheads and are much more accurate than they were in 2006. Hezbollah’s arsenal includes attack drones and coast-to-sea missiles, too. For its part, Israel is also better prepared. Iron Dome, which is designed to bring down short-range rockets, has been complemented by the introduction of the David’s Sling and Arrow systems, designed to intercept long-range rockets and ballistic missiles, respectively.

But against an onslaught of thousands of missiles, no Domes, Slings or Arrows will be able to provide the kind of defense Israelis have grown used to. Israel’s infrastructure and economic activity are vulnerable to even a limited missile attack from Hezbollah. Geographically, Israel is a small country with no hinterland, which means facilities for electric power and water are concentrated in small areas. More than a quarter of electric power is generated at just two sites. Natural gas is produced at a single offshore field and delivered via a single pipeline. A large portion of our exports derive from a single industrial plant. A prolonged missile war will almost certainly bring business to a halt.

Israel’s economy will shrink within a short-time period, according to Rosenberg:

In the worst-case scenario, a post-war Israel would no longer be seen by global investors and businesses as a safe place to put their money and do deals. Imagine Startup Nation without the constant flow of cross-border capital and mergers and acquisitions. The fantasy land of the last 11 years would disappear in a matter of days or weeks.

Rosenberg is correct. For example, during the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict, Israel was faced with economic uncertainties. The Times of Israel published an article during the conflict with an appropriate title War depresses people, economy; strong shekel harmful clarified what experts said on how the economy would be effected during a “drawn-out” conflict:

Experts temper the pessimism by noting that in the past, the Israeli economy has been resilient. If the current conflict is resolved quickly, there may be little cause for concern. On the other hand, a drawn out conflict in Gaza may cause investors to worry about the country’s stability and could cause long term damage to Israel’s reputation and position as a key player in the global economy.

“Our key concerns are the openness of the Israeli economy and our ability to be a key player in the global markets,” Zvi Eckstein, former deputy governor of the Bank of Israel and dean of the School of Economics at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC). Herzliya noted in an interview with The Times of Israel. “It’s really still a key uncertainty how the conflict will end up,” said Eckstein. “Most people predict we will get back to the same relatively stable geopolitical situation as we were in early July, and if so, I would say the economy would rebound back later next year. But if not, the threat to Israel’s economy would be quite devastating.”

That conflict was against a weaker adversary, Hamas. For starters, a war with Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Syria however would have a negative impact on Israel’s tourism industry where it receives more than 3 million tourists (mainly from the U.S. and Europe) per year. Israel’s level of production will also take a hit. The Street published an interesting article How Is Israel’s Economy Affected by the Current War? explaining what happened to Israel’s economy during the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict:

The Israeli economy suffers directly from reductions in productivity every time missile alert sirens send the country’s residents into bomb shelters. The economic costs of the war are estimated upwards of $2.9 billion, and already the war has soaked up 1.2% of the GDP. In the event that quiet prevails after a ceasefire is reached, the Israeli economy is resilient enough to withstand the costs of this operation.

History reflects that the Israeli economy surged at a rate of 6% prior to the 2006 Lebanon war and then slowed down to 2.9% prior to this current conflict. The tourism sector is going to be particularly hard hit, and if a third Intifada ensues, the economic costs for Israel could be crippling. Since a big chunk of Israel’s workforce is enlisted in the IDF, productivity declines are widespread and costs are mounting. The IMA (Israel Manufacturers Association) has already listed a figure of $240 million in losses as a result of the war effort.

Another War, Another Tragedy

Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. want to permanently eliminate the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance, and to achieve that goal, Lebanon will have to become another Libya, causing more chaos in an already volatile situation. The only beneficiaries in this coming war are Israel and the U.S., if of course, they are victorious. The U.S. and their allies would re-establish themselves as the hegemonic power in the Middle East with absolute control over the natural resources including oil, gas, and water. Israel would also expand and conquer more territory for Greater Israel. Saudi Arabia would remain a vassal state with more political leverage over its neighbors.

And if Saudi Arabia foolishly decided to go to war with Iran, the House of Saud will inevitably collapse, since Iran is much more stronger, militarily speaking. Washington plans to keep its military presence in Syria are a signal that removing Assad from power is still on the agenda. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Trump administration (decertifying the Iran Nuclear Deal with the intention to eventually kill the deal) is a recipe for a planned long-term conflict. Israel’s economy would suffer a major setback if they were to launch an attack against Hezbollah.

Besides, the fact that a war against Hezbollah would mean that missiles would constantly strike within Israel creating a massive amount of stress on Israeli citizens and a downturn of the economy would only add another dimension to the wide-reaching full-scale war. Israel hopes that Hezbollah will be temporally neutralized until the U.S. Congress and the Trump Administration jointly approve another military and economic aid package worth billions in time to continue its wars. Then there is the possibility of a joint U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israeli orchestrated attack on Syria to remove Assad from power to ultimately isolate Iran, but with Russia and China backing Iran, it would be a no-win situation. The biggest loser in all of its foreign policy blunders is the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

Israel’s plan to launch more aggressive wars against its neighbors to further an expansionist objective would come at a great cost to Israeli citizens, as their economy sinks into the rabbit hole, and the threat of incoming missiles from southern Lebanon makes it that much more worst. Lebanon and to an extent Israel will be once again devastated by a new war. For both sides of the border, it is a formula for disastrous consequences.

8ball writes: No, I’m telling you, the latest data shows the human genetic tree split into two about 250,000-300,000 years ago. Sub-Saharan Africans on one side, the rest on the other.

That is a fucking long time ago. For comparison Neanderthals split off from us about 600,000 years ago.

I am not aware of this new data. Someone needs to link me to some proof of this if it is even true at all, which I doubt. I don’t see how it’s true. All non-Africans came out of Africa 65,000 YBP. Africans could not have split off from non-Africans so early because all non-Africans were Africans themselves until 65,000 YBP.

There were no Homo sapiens sapiens 250-300,000 YBP. Our species had not even been created yet. We were some prior form or Homo, I think Homo sapiens idaltu, but even he does not appear until 190,000 YBP. I have never heard that Blacks split off that early. Anyway, Negroids are a new race. They were only formed in the last 9,000 years. The oldest races are the Khoisan (52,000 years), and the Orang Asli in Thailand (72,000 years). Everybody else is way more recent. There are no human lines that go back 250-300,000 years and anyway back then we were not even the fully modern humans that we are today.

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We already dealt with the racist nonsense about Black people being a different species than the rest of us. By the way, this is just another way of saying, “Niggers aren’t human,” which is exactly what a lot of anti-Black racists say about Black people in precisely those words.

I hate to break it to these guys, but Black people are as human as the rest of us. We are all one species.

I did a lot of research on the question the other day because I wanted to see if there was anything to the racist argument. The overwhelming opinion, based on multiple lines of excellent evidence is that all races of human are part of a single species. I won’t go into the lines of evidence here, but you can go look them up if you want. And it’s good science too, not junk science.

One of the lines is that no human race has any particular type of DNA that is particular to its own race. In different species, the new evidence is that all species have areas of DNA that are specific to just them. This is true even in species that can and do interbreed.

In studying two types of butterflies in the Amazon that readily interbreed, it was found that one area of DNA in each species never transferred to the other. Obviously when you mate two different lines, you end with each line contributing a lot of its DNA to the offspring. This is the DNA that carries over so to speak in interbreeding. The areas of DNA that never carried over or transferred in interbreeding were two areas: one that gave it its blue flavor and another that deals with how the blue butterfly is able to recognize others of its kind. In the orange butterfly, the non-transferring DNA was also for orange color and for how the species recognizes its own species. This is where we get the notion that “species breed true.”

Another is that humans can readily interbreed with other humans. For an example of what happens when humans breed with other hominid species, we can look at the evidence of human-Neandertal breeding.

Human-Neandertal breeding was very difficult and most of the offspring did not survive for some reason. Neandertal males mating with human females was rarely successful. However, human males mating with Neandertal females apparently worked sometimes.

The example given that species can interbreed is dog and wolves. However, science now says that dogs and wolves are one species. From my study of birds, when two different bird species start interbreeding a lot, after a while, they usually merge them into one species on the basis that they interbreed.

Crossbreeds of different species often produce sterile offspring. Yes, a horse can breed with a mule but the offspring is a donkey and donkeys are sterile. I believe that ligers, the offspring of lions and tigers, are also sterile. There are other species that can interbreed, however the offspring are weak, sickly and fail to thrive.

If any human races were separate species, we would expect to see something like the results of the human-Neandertal interbreeding and we don’t see that. Blacks and Whites can interbreed just fine, immaculately, in fact.

The question then boils down to whether any races could be said to be subspecies. The German Wikipedia has done some work on that and they have concluded that based on geographic separation, Negritos, Aborigines and Khoisan (Bushmen/Hottentots) could probably be seen as subspecies. On looking at their work, I think the writers on the German Wiki are basing their argument on good, solid science.

I would also argue that these three could be seen as subspecies based on genetic distance. The genetic line of Negroid Africans specifically does not go back all that far. They are a new race that only arose 9,000 YBP.

However, the Khoisan are one of the oldest people on Earth with a specific line going back 53,000 years.

Previously, a type of Negrito Australoid in Thailand, the Orang Asli, had been found to be the oldest race of living race with a line going back 72,000 years.

The Aborigine of course are very ancient. They are quite distant from all other humans. In fact the two races with the greatest distance between them are Aborigines and African Negroids. If anyone would have a hard time interbreeding it would be them, but there’s no evidence of any problems. On the other hand, few if any of them have bred at all. African Negroids and European Whites are dramatically closer to each other than Africans and Aborigines. If Africans and Aborigines are one species, how could Africans and Whites be two species? Makes no sense.

It is important to note that by their nature, all subspecies can interbreed. They are only called subspecies because for whatever reason, they only live in a restricted geographical area. In addition, there are some anatomical and genetic differences in all subspecies. At some genetic and anatomical difference level, two types of a species are said to be separate subspecies. Since no humans are restricted to any separate geographical areas, we cannot use that metric for setting aside human subspecies. However, I would no problem with setting aside Aborigines, Negritos and Khoisan as human subspecies. There’s nothing derogatory or racist about that statement, at least to any rational person, which leaves out all SJW’s.

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Despite being banned by Islam, many local forms of Islam developed that were outside of the original laws laid down by Mohammad. For instance, it was very common to have graveyards with gravestones in the Muslim World, especially in Central Asia. Worship of God via intercessionary saints and their temples was also quite common, especially in Northern Mesopotamia and over into Central Asia.

Both of these were associated with Sufism, the innovated Islamic form which has frankly always been the official Islam of the Sunnis of Iraq, including Saddam’s regime. Some of the later rebel groups in the Iraqi resistance were Sufis, even though Sufism is fairly quietist as far as Islam goes. Sufism is also very big in the Kurdish area, in Iran among the Shia as a Shia Sufism sanctioned all the way up to the mullah level, and of course into Afghanistan, which is really Ground Zero for this sort of shirk, innovation, etc. That some of the most fundamentalist Islam of all came out of such a central area of Islamic deviation is odd, or perhaps the fundamentalists were rebelling against all of the shirk and innovation.

It is well known outrage against all sorts of forms of shirk and heretical innovation in the Arab World that has led to the development of political Islam, the Salafists and onto Al Qaeda and ISIS. Make no mistake, the Salafists, Sunni fundamentalists, Salafists, Al Qaeda and ISIS are all products of the Arab World originally. Al Qaeda itself came out of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and then on to Sudan. The spread to Central Asia, where Al Qaeda relocated to Afghanistan, was a later development in context with the Islamic revolt against the Marxist regime there beginning in 1978-79.

These Salafists are back to basics purists similar to what a lot of fundamentalist Protestants nowadays claim to be. It was also similar to the Protestant Revolt, which was actually a back to basics revolt against the Catholic Church, mostly due to corruption due to selling of indulgences, writing the books in Latin, and the Church’s great wealth. Corrupt priests are hardly Christians at all. Writing the books in Latin a language few could read led to the religion being distorted into whatever the priests wanted it to be instead of the Word itself.

Jesus’ message was go forth and bring the good news to the common man, hence the missions of the Mormons and other missionaries, the Bible translation of SIL, etc. A real Christianity would write the books in whatever language the people could read. Writing in a language that the layfolk can’t even read is anti-Christian. And indeed, the most back to basic folks in Christianity nowadays are still the Protestants, analogous to Sunnis who believe that the Koran was divine word and must not be deviated from.

In contrast, the Shia are like the Catholics. The Catholics actually believe that the Christianity must constantly be reinterpreted to go along with the times, sort of like liberal living Constitution types in Constitutional law. This itself is actually quite progressive and it is the lack of a central authority banning back to basics and mandating living Christianity that leads to almost all true literary Biblicalist fundamentalists nowadays being Protestants.

The Vatican learned its lessons early on via Galileo in being anti-science. They have changed quite a bit. For God’s sake, the Vatican even has its own astronomer!

The resistance to the theory of evolution was mostly coming from the Protestants in the years after Darwin. The Catholic Church simply went agnostic on the subject, which I believe is still doctrinal to believers who can choose to believe or not even if the Church itself says that evolution is true.

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The main mistake about that by those who see them as a parallel species closer to apes than man relies upon the infamous argument of neoteny: evolution from ape to man (so as devolution from man to ape as some religious fundamentalists postulate) is supposed to have happened through greater and greater retention at adult age of traits only the primitive species’ infants shows before losing them at adult age.

But that argument, however seducing it seems, is fallacious the way it is used: clearly, for instance, dogs as we know them are descendants of the wild dog, which is a parallel species of wolves to the point only zoologists can distinguish them from other wolves. And from that lupine ancestry, dogs have evolved far more than humans are supposed to have evolved from more primitive men, they have kept infantile traits at a degree humans themselves never went to…yet they remain dogs and show no sign of turning into a kind of speaking intelligent species capable of writing with all fours.

Though they cannot survive outside an apartment and require the same care as a human infant or even more, they still bark and bite each one according to its capacity. Neoteny produces domestic or more domesticable animals out of wild ones and nothing beyond. Neoteny alone cannot make a lineage change of species, nothing of that kind of phenomenon has ever been observed under any microscope or otherwise through paleontological history. You could still invent more and more puppy-like races of dogs under the pressure of lawmakers prohibiting Rottweilers, none of these new races would end up being human-like or humanoid-like in any way, none of these dogs would suddenly learn to speak like Pluto, though they may look like cartoon dogs more and more.

African Blacks show many traits (though not all) of less or no neoteny compared to the mean European and even more compared to East Asians (for instance African babies learn to sit and adopt various other adult postures at an earlier age than other humans), but that may make an African a wilder human, NOT a lesser human…in the very same way Sub-Saharan Africa seems to be by its ecological vocation the conservatory of the wilder versions of so many other species, like the wild dogs, the wild asses (which include the zebra as well as countless other onagres), the wild buffaloes, and the famed wild elephants.

African elephants, for being wild and having never been domesticated, are not less elephantine than the ones used in India and Indochina as beast of burden or transportation, in the same way the wild African buffaloes are by no means less bovine than the domestic buffaloes used in India to till the soil: quite the contrary, anybody would qualify the African elephant as more elephant-like by its spectacular bodily features than its more modestly-looking Indian far cousin, for the same reason wild bulls and buffaloes have always symbolized the epitome of bovine nature with far more intensity and sacredness than domestic oxen.

Europeans are not more human than Africans, they are more domesticable and amenable to so-called civilized life, actually it is a more polite expression to say they are easier to enslave and put to hard work by neurological programming rather than by mere physical shackles only.

Some say among Haitian and Benin voodoo practitioners that Whites and Asians were the first species reduced to a more fragile and specialized one but far easier to put to useful work by the process of trans-generational domestication and bodily modification by the first animal tamers: according to them, non-Blacks are born out of the will of malevolent sorcerers to dispose of population of dependent slaves by birth. That is probably a short caricature, but there seems to be something real about it.

So many proverbs from so many cultures are wont to say laughter is what really makes humans human, animals being so serious in comparison of the most serious humans. Do Black Africans laugh less?

Nope folks, Black people are fully human, just like us. Their line has been evolving longer than ours has, by the way. Also, Negroids are a new race, as new as Europeans. They only go back 9,000 years in agricultural Central Africa in the context of organized agriculture and the village societies it produced. If you want to look at Blacks who are more archaic, check out the Khoisans. Their genetic line at least goes back ~45,000 years, the oldest of any humans. Pygmies are also very archaic. Some proto-Pygmies were around ~50,000 YBP.

European types only go back ~13,000 years. Before that, Europeans looked like Arabs and before that, like Amerindians from Washington state. Check out the Makah. Their skulls are closest to Europeans ~22,000 YBP. If you go back 35,000 YBP in Southern Russia, Proto-Caucasians look Australoid. So Australoid types may be the mother of us all.

Anyway Whites and Blacks can breed just fine, so we are not separate species. In fact when two species of say birds start breeding in the wild, they quit calling them separate species and lump them all into one species because they can breed.

Someone recently asked me my unadulterated views on intelligence variance among the races. Incidentally, he was a Black man. Generally, I take the 5th on that question and simply say that there are intelligence differences among the races, that is, yes, Whites are smarter than Blacks, NE Asians and Jews are smarter than White Gentiles, etc., all on average, mind you, but IQ tests prove this very well, and IQ tests absolutely measure intelligence better than any other device we have. Usually just saying that it’s a proven fact that on average Whites are smarter than Blacks is enough to consign me to the Societal Doghouse for eternity, so I don’t bother piling it on. I say yes, Whites are smarter than Blacks, but we don’t know what causes this, if it is genes or environment or both or something in the air. In public statements I say I am agnostic on the causes.

The truth is that I am lying. I simply do not want to come out and say that there are genetic differences in intelligence between the races because my name is mud enough as it is and there’s no reason to keep digging once your enemies have thrown you in a hole that goes halfway to China already.

But now I will come out and confess that I do believe that there are genetic differences in IQ between the races. I expect that I will now be vastly more ostracized than I am already after I say this.

I do believe there are cognitive differences between the races that are genetic. However, I add one proviso to that. Usually when people that there are behavioral or cognitive differences between the races, what usually follows is a Doomsday statement along the lines of “No hope for Blacks.” They say that Blacks will be less intelligent and highly criminal forever since it’s genetic and genes are destiny.

The thing is I don’t believe in that. I believe that genes tend to be destiny in a macro but not micro sense, that is among groups but not among individuals and subject to much variation.

But I also believe that environments can modify genetic tendency. A typical environment will result in a typical behavior and cognitive outcome for the group. A bad environment, which we seem to specialize in as humans, will result a catastrophic outcome for the group with behavioral and cognitive outcomes expressed at an extreme level. A good environment will result in the behavioral and cognitive outcome being relatively better for the group.

And an extremely good environment or a Super-environment as I call it may result in an outcome for the group that completely washes out the behavioral or cognitive profile for the group allows them to match better performing groups. I am reminded of a Black tribe in Burkina Faso of one million members. They have a homicide rate as low as the Japanese, 1/100,000. They are Muslims, they live in the desert, they value education, they live a very traditional life and perhaps most importantly, they place great value on the wisdom of elders, especially male elders.

People like to say that you can never turn Blacks into Norwegians or Japanese. In terms of sense of humor, I think Blacks not turning into Norwegians is an excellent trend. This syllogism is true as far as it goes, but here we have a tribe of 1 million Blacks in the darkest heart of Black Africa where none of the light of modernity shines who at least on one important variable, have somehow managed to turn themselves into Japs.

In intelligence, we know have a case in the UK similar to the case in Burkina Faso for behavior.

Nevertheless, the latest scores out of the UK have British Blacks matching Whites on high school achievement tests. It’s not an IQ test but it can be a proxy for one. Anyway it predicts job success and performance very well, so it doesn’t matter if it’s not an IQ test.

There is a solution to this conundrum. Even with genetic IQ differences, there still room for environment to close the gap. However, the environment for Blacks to close the gap as British Blacks did would have to be a “super-environment” which may have been achieved in ultra-PC UK. However, I would say that these super-environments are hard to achieve, and most places will not be able to create them, so Blacks will fall behind in most environments.

In contrast, Whites and Asians need only a typical environment to succeed. In a poor environment, a lot of poorer Whites will fall behind but many others will succeed. The Blacks will simply be completely plowed under far worse than in an ordinary environment. Curiously the cognitive power of some groups like Chinese and Jews may be so high that they can surmount genetically even quite poor environments. Their genes just plow right over the environment.

In the same way, Blacks do have a tendency towards crime that I regard as genetic. However, if we set IQ at 113 (about yours) Blacks and Whites have the same crime rates. So if we could raise Black IQ, we could lower Black crime because as Black IQ rises, cognitive capacity rises up and overpowers or overwhelms any genetic tendency towards crime. In other words, an intelligent Black man may have the same genetic tendency towards crime as an 85 IQ Black man, but the 113 IQ Black man’s IQ simply overrides, bulldozes and plows over the genetic tendency towards crime because IQ suppresses criminal behavior and as IQ rises, crime drops because of the crimino-suppressant effect of rising IQ.

As you can see, my views on this are quite nuanced. Yes, Blacks are less intelligent and more criminal than Whites and this is in part due to genes. However, given the right environment, these outcomes can be improved and if you make the environment spectacular enough, you can even wash out these genetic tendencies entirely and Blacks can match Whites or even East Asians. However, creating these Super-environments is going to be very hard to do.

I have also postulated a theory about how increasing IQ serves to suppress genetic tendencies towards crime and how IQ acts as a barrier against bad environments, with the highest IQ’s having nearly suppressive effects on bad environments, average IQ’s have a subset badly affected by bad environments while others weather it and the lowest IQ’s being no barrier at all against bad environments or even worsening their bad effects by introducing the equation of Low IQ + bad environment which seems to result in an exponential effect worse than either alone.

Not that my nuanced views will matter to the Commissars of the Cultural Left though. I’m already an Enemy of the People, and this will just increase my sentence at the intellectual gulag archipelago where I was shipped to long ago.

Becoming suicidal is often but not always indicative of mental illness. Philosophically, it simply means that you do not want to live anymore, and you don’t have to be nuts to feel way. Life’s hard for everyone, and at some point, a lot of people just can’t take it anymore and want to bail out or end the pain. Indeed, a person certainly feels no more pain after suicide.

People kill themselves for all sorts of reasons. Only 70% of suicides are clinically depressed. A lot of people commit suicide simply out of boredom, believe it or not. Some people seem to do it for absolutely no reason at all. It’s as if they did it for shits and giggles or as a way of trolling the human race. I suppose in a way, suicide is the ultimate troll. Suicides are trolling the whole damn world, every one of us.

Suicide is a mystery.

We have been studying it forever, and we still hardly know a thing about it. A man wrote a big book on suicide a while back, and at the end of the book he said he didn’t understand suicide any better at the end than when he had started.

Some countries have high suicide rates, and no one seems to know why. Other countries have low suicide rates, and no one knows why.

Hungary had high suicide rates under feudalism, monarchy, fascism, communism and now democracy. People killed themselves at the same rate in all systems.

The Japanese have always had a high suicide rate, and no one knows why. Impoverished North Korea has an extremely low suicide rate while next door ultra-wealthy Japan has a very high rate. There is no good explanation for the difference.

It may be cultural. Some societies may be more pro-suicide than others.

Anti-socialists like to say that Swedes have a high suicide rate. They claim that Swedish socialism gives people everything they need and maybe want, but it leaves them bored and unmotivated and hopeless to improve their lot, so they end it all. But all places on Earth at that latitude have a high suicide rate. It is so dark half the year that the sun only comes out for a few hours a day, and it is cold all the time. There are high suicide rates in Norway, Iceland, Finland, Estonia, Russia (especially Siberia), Alaska, Northern Canada, and Greenland. Anyway, the Swedes had a high suicide rate even before socialism. Other countries have an identical system to Swedish socialism, and they have low suicide rates.

Actually, the suicide rate was comparatively low in the USSR and Eastern Europe under communism. However, with the transition to capitalism in 1990, suicide rates skyrocketed over the next 10-15 years as did forms of slow suicide such as drinking oneself to death. So the Communism/socialism causes suicide theory seems to be washed up. If anything, suicide seems to be linked to capitalism a lot more than it is linked to socialism or Communism.

Nigeria is one of the most hellish and nightmarish places on Earth at least from my perspective, and from any point of view, it’s basically a shithole. In fact, it is probably one of the foulest shitholes on Earth. Yet Nigerians typically among the happiest people on Earth. They’re smiling amid the stinking, crime-infested, ultraviolent ruins, while the Swedes and Japs are blowing their brains out in lavish apartments drowning in luxury.

Go figure.

Bottom line is that a lot of human behavior is either not easily explained or simply doesn’t seem to make much sense at all. People feel however they do for whatever reasons they do, and it’s often hard to figure out why.

Although the Muslim Brotherhood is officially opposed to Al Qaeda and tends to take a legalist and democratic approach to obtaining power, the organization is nevertheless very radical and many radical Muslims gravitate to the MB as the only game in town. In turn, as they radicalize in the MB, the more radicalized people spin off to Al Qaeda, ISIS and other radical jihadi groups. Then some of the Al Qaeda people spin back into the Brotherhood, this time hiding their radical views.

It is not well known, but Hamas is nothing less than the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. The MB is illegal in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Qatar. They led an uprising in 1982 in Syria where 30,000 people were killed. The survivors went to Europe and also to Saudi Arabia where they met up with Egyptian MB members who were working and teaching in the Kingdom. These MB religious folk were then in turn influenced by the allegedly quietist Wahhabism, the official doctrine of Saudi Arabia. The MB religious teachers then supercharged Wahhabism while Wahhabism itself radicalized the MB teachers in terms of Islamic doctrine. It was this mixture of the Ikhwan and Wahhabism that eventually morphed into bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. From and around Al Qaeda all sorts of other radical jihadi groups emerged, especially in Iraq and Syria. Most of the groups in Syria are either Al Qaeda linked or inspired or if not, are not a great deal different from Syrian Al Qaeda, now called Al Nusra.

Another origin of Al Qaeda was in Egypt where as above, the MB served as a nursery of sorts for Islamic radicals. Radicals kept spinning off the MB and forming more radicalized splits. Sayed Qutb was one of the first, and Al Qaeda is simply Qutbism writ large. He was executed by Nasser in the 1950’s.

Another split occurred in the late 1970’s, when another radical group spun off of the MB and evolved into various factions. One of these factions developed the Qutbist notion that the entire Muslim world was now living in a state of jahaliyya or pre-Islamic ignorance. The entire society of Muslim Egypt was tainted by infidel and anti-Islamic influences. Some of these people dropped out of society and went to live like hermits in caves in the desert. They saw the entire society as corrupt and evil, so they had no alternative but to completely drop out of it and live in isolated hermitage like early Christians.

It was here that Zayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian eye surgeon and bin Laden’s 2nd in command, got his start. He developed some followers in the city he lived in and he eventually dropped out of society and went to live in caves with the rest of the radicals.

Around this time, a lot of these radicals got wrapped up in plot to assassinate Anwar Sadat, mostly for the crime of making peace with Israel. The assassins, of which there were several, were ex-MB members who had spun off from the group. About 1,000 radicals were rounded up after the assassination. Al-Zawahiri was one of them. There is footage of a wild-eyed Zawahiri in a crowded jail cell with ~40 other men. He is gripping the cell bars and shouting along with many others.

After his release, Zawahiri went on to form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. This and several other very radical jihadi groups waged war on the Egyptian state in the early 80’s. Zawahiri’s movement, which had ~1,500 members, was crushed by the state. Jihadis were taken out into the Egyptian desert, tied to a pole and left there. It didn’t take long for them to perish from lack of food or water. In this way, the movement was crushed. Zawahiri fled Egypt and may have taken up with bin Laden in Sudan for a while.

The remains of Islamic Jihad combined with the nascent Al Qaeda forming in the Kingdom via the mixture of Egyptian and Syrian MB and Saudi Wahhabis to form the nucleus of the early Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda got increasingly radicalized during bin Laden’s stay there. Finally both men went to Afghanistan for the Afghan jihad which radicalized huge numbers of Muslims all over the world, mostly in the Arab World. As they fought in Afghanistan, they become increasingly radicalized. Zawahiri had always argued for fighting the “near enemy” first – the secular Arab regimes, but bin Laden’s radical theory was to switch from a war only against the near enemy to a war against the “far enemy,” which bin Laden called the US for its support for Israel and the secular Arab dictatorships.

The MB is hated and outlawed in Qatar and Saudi Arabia more on the grounds of rivalry than anything else. Qatar and the Saudis see the Ikhwan as a threat to royal power. After a military coup overthrew the elected MB government in Egypt, the new leader Sisi has formed a major alliance with the Saudis and the Qataris. The Saudis have responded by flooding Sisi’s government with oil money.

In Jordan, most of the Parliament is made of the MB members, which is one reason why the powers of the Parliament have been severely limited by the King.

The MB is quite active in north Lebanon near Tripoli where Lebanon’s 20% Sunnis live. These people have become increasingly radicalized and are now engaged in open warfare with Alawis living in some of these cities. Some of these Sunnis also seem to have gone to Syria to join up with the jihadi groups. The MB in this part of Lebanon is known for its dislike of Lebanon’s Shia and Hezbollah.

The MB was formed by Hassan Al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher, in 1922. It is one of the oldest radical Muslim groups in the world.

Your claim that gays and lesbians live on average 20 years less than heterosexuals of their gender is incredible. That is a huge difference. What are your sources? I’m quite willing to believe that gays live on average not as long as heterosexual men, but 20 Years?! As to lesbians, what could possibly cause such a big gap in life expectancy between them and heterosexual women?

Regards. James

I don’t have the studies right in front of me, but this is a repeated finding in social science. The gays refuse to accept it though, so we have to keep going back and doing it over and over. It was thought that discrimination had something to do with it, but the finding was recently replicated in Sweden and Denmark. Also this finding goes back to the pre-HIV era I believe. It is notable that only 2% of gay men are over 65. Most of them simply do not make it that far.

To be completely fair, the most recent study of all in Canada did not find a 20 year reduction. They found a 14 year reduction. Just as stereotypes would suggest, lesbians are often overweight. Obesity is a chronic finding among lesbians and it is thought that it contributes to the reduced life expectancy. Also lesbians smoke far more than straight women. They also drink quite a bit more alcohol. These findings go back forever. In addition, lesbians have extremely high rates of breast cancer for obvious reasons.

As far as why gay men don’t live as long, I am not sure what the reasons for that are. Obviously HIV is a factor, but this was going on even before HIV. I suppose the best answer is that the lifestyle that many gay men choose to live is not a healthy one that leads to a long life.

The reason most of you have never heard of these figures is because of our fanatically pro-gay culture in the West. You simply cannot write anything negative about these saints in human form called homosexuals. If you do, you’re a bigot. The gays are getting to be just as bad as the Jews and the Blacks about wearing their glorious victim status as a proud badge. Furthermore, there are people who do talk about facts like this along with many other less than flattering facts about homosexuality (mostly about gay men) but there has been a decades long campaign waged against these people calling them liars and basically evil people.

A very prominent one is Paul Cameron. There have been calls to throw him out of the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association due to his findings. Furthermore, he has had to publish his findings in obscure journals because no mainstream journals of psychological “science” and sociological “science” will accept his work. Further, these groups have claimed to speaking in the interests of science when they bash Cameron’s work. It is frequently stated that everything Cameron says about gays is a lie. His finding that homosexuals live 20 years less than straights has been bashed because he did this study over a period of time simply by reading obituaries and adding up the ages of the people who died. Nevertheless, there were a number of studies after Cameron done with much better epidemiology that replicated his findings. Psychological “science” never discusses these studies.

To be fair, Cameron is a pretty nasty fellow and he definitely hates homosexuals, especially gay men. He recently came out in favor of a bill in the Ugandan Legislature that called for the death penalty for men arrested for homosexual acts. Nevertheless, ad hominem is a logical fallacy as old as man himself and anyone with a brain knows that ad hominem attacks are always false on their face. Still humans simply cannot accept how a horrible person could be right about much of anything (presumably they can’t even tell if it is day or night) much less that could be right about many things.

Here’s some news for all of you out there who can’t think, which is the vast majority of you: